Wrapping your head around Shakespeare style can be challenging, whether you're a student reading The Bard for the first time or an adult wrestling with Shakespeare quotations. Shakespeare wrote in the language and style of his time. It made him wildly popular and his works have endured. The English language changed radically under his hand, but some of the middle English found in his works can be difficult to comprehend.
Iambic Pentameter and Shakespeare Language Style
Shakespeare wrote wrote in verse. He used a style known as iambic pentameter for most of his plays. Iambic pentameter requires that each line has 10 syllables. The syllables are five pairs of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables.
The rhythm of each line is ba-BUM / ba-BUM / ba-BUM / ba-BUM / ba-BUM. To use a line from Hamlet, "Is this / a dag- / -ger I / see be- / fore me?" Each beat (ba-BUM) represents a pair of syllables called an iambus.
Shakespeare is considered a master of iambic pentameter, but he didn't invent it. It was around long before Shakespeare arrived on the scene and it remains a popular form of verse today.
Shakespeare's Sonnet Style
Shakespeare considered a master playwright, but he also wrote beautiful sonnets, or love poems. Sonnets can be traced back to the Renaissance Italian poet Francesco Petrarch. He needed a way to express his love, so he adapted a medieval song form to fit what he wanted to say.
The structure of a sonnet is 14 lines. Each line contains a very concentrated expression of love in which the rhythm and rhyme, along with many metaphors, produce a significant amount of meaning.
Poets in Elizabethan times found the sonnet the perfect vehicle to express to ladies how much they loved them. The sonnet was not only an expression of love; Elizabethan poets often used it as a way to display their poetic skills. Shakespeare was well aware of his great skill in writing sonnets and frequently joked about his abilities in his sonnets.
Extracting Meaning
While Shakespeare's plays and sonnets remain popular today, they can be somewhat difficult to read as the modern reader is confronted with unusual sentence structures, wordplay and poetic compressions and omissions. While you are struggling to decipher Shakespeare, remember that more than 400 years have passed since Shakespeare wrote these great works. Although a lot of his vocabulary is still in use, there are some words that are no longer in use, or their meanings have evolved.
A good way to decipher what Shakespeare was saying is to read the sonnets or plays line by line. It helps to have a dictionary at hand to help decode unknown words or phrases.
It also helps to see a Shakespeare play performed. The actors have studied the language of Shakespeare, understand the meaning of his words and are able to convey their meaning to an audience. If nothing else, sometimes seeing the action itself helps the listener understand what Shakespeare meant.
There are also several books and Web sites dedicated to translating Shakespeare's works line-by-line, giving the hidden meaning and context behind what he is saying. Some even apply modern phrases or conventions to his old-fashioned words. If you find yourself truly lost, look for annotated versions of Shakespeare's sonnets and plays. These versions use detailed footnotes to explain the meaning of unfamiliar words.
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